The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Monday, April 22, 2013

See God, time to play

Shiva and Parvati (and Nandi, leant on) - Wiki

Sethren, it has been a long climb.Now we are at the top of the mountain, face
to face with God.Who is a very big
demon indeed.About the same size as
nipple was when we were two days old.And as abstruse as nipple is flesh.Gods used to be like people, ancient people in warmer climes than the
Huddersfield ringroad, descended from ogres and monsters but now, save for poor
Hephaestus, perfect.Oh ye who have seen
Parvati and Shiva glowing in the bronze and can only ease the sense of yearning by
laying a hand on nature, on the warm rough hide of Nandi, as I lay my hand on
this frigid metal here, this bus stop, to short myself to earth, to rotate my
coordinates to stable up and down and left and right, in the face of the vision
that stretches before me.God now is so
abstract that the alliances of demons that once, for four thousand years at the
most, were attracted to Him in such numbers that they were like the atoms of a
whole galaxy wheeling round a black hole, have all but deserted him.They have flittered to other more primitive
gods, the kind that walked the earth when Solomon built his temple, if he ever
did, tyrant gods or sentimental mummydaddy gods, leaving God as nothing but the
answer to any question to which we do not know the answer.

So what is this vision I see, sethren?It is what we are when what God stood for is
almost wholly dissipated.It is the
vision of what a human being is.It is
an organism that is the environment in which Evoculture evolves.And if that sounds to you derisory, know that
it is the total fucking miracle, far beyond magic, beyond turning water into
wine or healing the sick or hearing a voice in a cave or in a dungeon, the total fucking
miracle of a space so huge inside a head, and inside every head and extending
into everything that goes on in the physical universe, an ideoverse open to the
metaverse where exists, and only where exists, everything.Nipples, all gods, all poetry, music, all
pigment, emoticons and Twitter, Darwin’s Origin
of Species, all politics, medicine, economics, sex and those photographs of spaces that give an inkling of the size of the neural substrate, those reaches
of seeming for ever thousands of light-years distant.

That is what we can see from the top of the mountain.It’s not going to change or lives much.The wind is still cold, we still have a Prime
Minister who attests that he is Green, yet cannot see the simple connection
between fracking and the ruin of the Earth.For as I have said, Evoculture does not care for us.Like all evolution, it is merely a pattern of
its own survival.It has made us what we
are reciprocally with what we have made it; Dubai.Which clearly, grotesque idiocy that it is,
evolved in the matrix of its own destruction.Because half of what we are is the process of demons, and demons are dependent
on now.That is all.They have zero, zero, zero, foresight.Our Prime Minister as a person knows that
fracking is almost certainly deeply damaging to our species in the long
term.But as a politician, he is merely
a transducer of a certain summation of demons, a myth, and he trumpets idiocy on
behalf of all of us.

Now we are at the top of the mountain, certain things become
apparent.Look at three concepts.Red triangle.Blue triangle.Blue circle.From this it follows that while the potential
number of demons may be finite, the number of concepts is infinite.Also that, while demons may be loci,
concepts are processes of the architecture of the neural substrate.

And we shall look at them next.And see how concepts themselves ally, and
form myths, truths, lies, praxes.And
how such alliances are themselves environments for the evolution of
culture; but evolution at the level of
demons, sethren, always and only.
Soon
it will be time to play.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.